ZEPHYR, PRESENT DAY
He was cheating on her.
Zephyr was a hundred percent—all right, maybe not a hundred, she tended to overexaggerate things in her own head, perhaps ninety percent— sure that opening the door of the seedy little dungeon hole he’d led her to, for a fight of all things, would reveal him with some bimbo. Or maybe she wouldn’t be a bimbo. Maybe she would be some incredibly nice but naive girl who fell for his handsome looks and witty charm without realizing he was in a relationship with a curvaceous hairstylist. A curvaceous hairstylist he’d told numerous times that she needed to lose some of the curves and she’d be ‘so fucking sexy, babe’. The curvaceous hairstylist, aka her, aka Zephyr de la Vega, aka the biggest idiot on the planet to ever imagine there could be a future with him when she wasn’t in love. But god, she’d been tired of being single at twenty-eight, with everyone telling her she should be with someone.
And though she didn’t love him, she was in a relationship, and she had her pride, which was exactly why she stood outside the door; dread, anger, and certainty pooling in the pit of her stomach.
You’re sexy, you’re beautiful, you’re a goddess, she kept chanting, her belief in her own words slightly lesser compared to the morning when she’d woken up with a good life, in a mostly-okay relationship with the perfect guy. The perfect guy who, she was sure, was railing someone behind the door.
“Oh, yes,” a feminine wail from inside made the wince on her face tighten, her hand gripping the dirty-looking handle that made her want to scrub it clean.
“And now, the finisher is in the cage!”
The crowd roared from the arena beyond the dingy corridor she was in. It smelled like something had died in there, and something probably had. She couldn’t be sure. Her boyfriend had traveled to the industrial district for this shady fight, and she’d followed him, only to be lost in the crowd with two scary-looking bouncer-type dudes who’d looked at her suspiciously. She wasn’t surprised, though. In her colorful floral dress reminiscent of spring, she was as out of place in the dungeon hole as an elephant at an airport. Wait, did elephants even go to airports? How did they transfer them overseas in case of emergencies, though? Maybe they—
Focus, Zee.
She took a deep breath, halting the internal rambling. She did that a lot, ramble that was. Word vomit was a common affliction where she was concerned, especially when her nerves were taut. And they were very, very taut as she stood in the corridor she’d found her boyfriend walking into. Because if she found what she knew she was going to find, she’d be single again. Moreover, it would also strain things with her parents because her mother already considered him a son-in-law, though her father was pretty ‘meh’ about him.
Gritting her teeth, calling on her nerves to calm down, she tugged on the handle, only to open the door a few inches to see a man’s bare ass pumping into a woman against the dirty wall. The fact that she was more concerned about the woman’s hygiene than the fact that she recognized that butt was a bit revelationary.
So this was what being cheated upon felt like.
Huh.
Kind of anti-climactic, if she was being honest.
Zephyr had always wondered in the back of her mind, seeing it in movies or reading it in books, the cliché of the woman finding her lover’s infidelity or the bride being jilted at the altar, and she’d always wondered if the tears had been because of the hurt, the humiliation, the anger, or the loss of that idea of perfection. Maybe it was all of them. She couldn’t exactly pinpoint.
Weirdly, as she watched the very nice ass pump away, she only felt a sense of ‘I told you so’ within herself. Had a part of her always known he was scum underneath the pretty? Had she written it off as her own insecurities rearing their head? Perhaps. And though, surprisingly, she wasn’t as hurt as she’d thought she would be, she was pissed, getting more so with each oblivious pump. And being pissed was not a good look on her, especially because she did irrational shit in the heat of the moment.
She locked her jaw, trying to contain her anger, but with each thrust, she remembered each little way he’d made her feel inadequate, made her feel just a bit less. Every ‘don’t eat that’, every targeted comment about thigh gaps being sexy while jokingly telling her she’d never get one, every exasperated sigh about her quirky hair colors whenever she changed them. She’d been with him for over two years, and now looking back, all she saw was a bunch of gaslighting and good, old dickery. And the fact that she’d always prided herself on being a good lover, his penis falling in another
woman’s vagina was a hit to that belief, more than she wanted to admit.
She wanted to feel adequate. She wanted to feel beautiful. She wanted to feel desirable.
The last man who’d made her feel all those things— Don’t think about him.
She wanted to feel anything but what she was feeling as she watched the man she’d been thinking of settling down with. And she wanted to make him feel like shit. Yeah, she was petty like that. God, she was an idiot. But at least she was an idiot who’d dodged a bullet. Stepping back from the door, Zephyr looked at the dirty handle, unsure what she was going to do exactly.
“Alpha! Alpha! Alpha!”
The chanting of the crowd drew her attention, suddenly making her heart stop, taking her entire focus away from the scene toward the arena.
Alpha?
Did they say Alpha?
No, it couldn’t be.
She looked at the door leading to the arena, her palms clammy, her heart pounding. It was an unusual name, and she’d only known of one man who’d used it. He’d been a fighter too, but it couldn’t be him. That was almost a decade ago . . .
Unnerved, her cheating boyfriend forgotten by the stronger memory elicited by that name, she followed the noise of the spectators and exited the foul-smelling corridor to a slightly better-smelling sort of open space. It smelled like places that had never seen the sunlight did—slightly dank, slightly musty, slightly sweaty. It wasn’t a place for a girl like her—one from a nice family, dressed in a bright floral dress, with hair she’d dyed pink recently because her mother was certain something good was going to happen to her soon.
‘Just a feeling, baby,’ her mama had told her affectionately.
She’d been waiting for that good thing. Was this it? Was it him, back again? It couldn’t be. God, she was a gigantic idiot.
Watching the spectacle in front of her, she tried to see for herself if it was her Alpha before she had to deal with real life.
The fight was probably illegal, which was most likely why it was in such a dungeon-like space in the industrial district, better known as the creepy no-go zone of the city. This was the part of the city kids who wanted to play scary games came to. Mostly, it was just famous for seedy criminal activities. She just hoped no one got raided because the prison wasn’t on her bucket list.
The dungeon, if it could be called that, was huge and dark and not like any basement she’d ever seen. The walls were solid rock and the ceiling super high, with some huge lights that would honestly be painful to look at directly. The central space was a caged-off ring and the crowd of mostly men and a few women surrounded the cage, with some bouncer-type scary men against the walls, keeping an eye on everyone.
“Break his arm, Alpha!” the guy immediately to her right yelled loud enough to wake the dead.
“Spray his fucking blooooood!”
“Knock him out and I’ll suck your dick, you beast!” That came from a particularly enthusiastic lady somewhere in the room. Zephyr cringed. As long as it wasn’t her Alpha, the lady could suck whatever she wanted. She’d always been irrationally possessive of him.
A violent crash of a body hitting the metal of the cage broke her thoughts, drawing her eyes toward the main event.
Her eyebrows hit her hairline.
A shirtless man, no, a shirtless giant had another smaller guy (who would’ve been huge on his own, but looked tiny in comparison) pinned against the cage from the back. She could see what the
lady had been talking about. A beast, indeed. He had the smaller guy’s arm twisted behind him at an awkward angle, the other holding him down like a dog. But it wasn’t just the fight that had Zephyr’s attention.
It was his eyes, or rather his one eye. He wore an honest-to-god eye patch over his right eye, his left glimmering a light color she couldn’t really make out from afar. Eye patches, in her head, were things pirates wore to look badass, as they raided ships and claimed maidens in historical romances. In this day and age, people usually just put in a fake prosthetic eye if they needed. The fact that this veritable giant wore an eye patch to a fight with an opponent of seemingly good vision . . . damn.
But he looked nothing like the boy from her fateful memories.
“Fuck him up goooood!!!”
Jesus, the guy next to her was really, really bloodthirsty.
“I want him so bad!” another woman’s voice said from somewhere. “Can you believe he’s not fucking anyone for over a year now? I’ve tried to hit him up so many times.”
“Girl, he scares the living shit out of me. No way I’m going near that.”
“Just imagine the sex, though. I’ve heard he makes you praise the lord.”
Zephyr listened to the conversation intently, trying to place if this was him.
She tried not to let the crowd jostle her smaller frame as she watched the fight from the back, her mind occupied for the moment, the weight on her chest heavy.
The beast stepped back from the smaller guy, setting him free, putting his entire frame in her line of sight to her for the first time. A long scar went down from his hairline, under his eye patch, down to the corner of his mouth, permanently pulling it down in a scary
frown on one side. A million more scars littered his torso with some tattoos over a million muscles she didn’t know a human could possess. And for such a large man, he moved with a fluidity that belied him.
Raw, brutal strength—that’s what he was.
Alpha, that’s what the crowd had called him, and she could see why. The more she watched him, the more fascinated she became, the more the urge to confirm his identity seeped into her pores.
Shortie turned to him, swinging his arm out, his fist aimed at the black patch, and Zephyr could feel her breath locking in her throat, suddenly invested in not wanting the beast to get hurt. Before she could blink, in a move that she wouldn’t have thought he could have caught with his limited peripheral vision, he blocked Shortie and delivered a sharp uppercut on his side, possibly breaking a rib with the force behind it.
Oof.
Shortie gripped his side and howled as the crowd went crazy. Yeah, that would’ve hurt.
Just as she winced in sympathy, as Shortie stayed bent on the cage floor, this Alpha cracked his neck and looked out at the crowd for the first time. She saw that singular gaze glance over the gathering and pause on her. It was probably her shock of pink hair that caught his eye or her dress. She didn’t know, and she didn’t really think.
She couldn’t think.
It was the same heaviness. There had always been something . . . intense about being looked at by him. Something so heavy she could feel it weighing down on her chest, escalating her heartbeats, making her palms clammy. A bead of sweat rolled down her neck into her cleavage, and dear lord, she remembered what it had been like being looked at by him with both his eyes.
It felt like him.
Tears burned her eyes.
So fucking long.
It lasted for a few seconds before he turned to his opponent again. “Zee? What the hell are you doing here?”
The words made her eyes flutter shut for a second as reality crashed back on her. She’d hoped for a little more time before the confrontation. For all her outgoing, exuberant personality, confrontations were something she could never get herself to handle. She hated them. And whenever the need arose for one, she avoided them completely. This wasn’t how she would’ve imagined it. She would’ve gone home and sent him a break-up text.
Now, there was a confrontation to be had and she had no interest in it, her entire attention on the man in the cage. Blowing out a breath, she slowly turned around to face the man she’d be making her ex in three seconds.
“We’re done, Alec,” she told him, taking in his very handsome profile. He was hot, there was no denying it, and he knew it too.
She saw his dark brows slash down as they did when he was about to mansplain something to her. “What do you mean?”
“Meaning you can go fuck yourself or fuck another girl like the one in the back. We’re finished.”
“Zee—”
She held her hand up. “Save it.”
The crowd went wild at something happening in the cage, and Zephyr felt her emotions crash all over the place. She didn’t want to deal with Alec, but he knew he was caught and he couldn’t talk himself out of it, which meant he was going to go on the offensive. In moments, a predictable sneer curled his lips, and Zephyr braced herself.
“It’s too late, Zee,” he reminded her, as though she needed it. “You’ll be twenty-nine in a month, and your grandmother’s fund will be frozen out if you don’t marry me. I was going to propose to you on your birthday. One fuck isn’t worth all that.”
Her throat tightened even as rage infused her veins. Yes, her grandmother’s fund. Her lovely grandmother had never married and regretted it her entire life, so she’d made sure that her granddaughter wouldn’t make the same mistake and find herself a life partner. She’d left some old family heirlooms with a clause that Zephyr had to be married by her twenty-ninth birthday to access them.
Now, Zephyr was pretty non-mercenary, and didn’t care enough for the money to get married. But the family heirlooms had been in her father’s line for over five generations, and the sneaky old lady had known her mother would rather get her married at gunpoint than let something so valuable to their heritage go to charity. Alec had been a catch. She was a middle-class girl, and he was a good-looking man, came from money, and had influence in the city. She loved her parents and they loved her, and she couldn’t deny that seeing Alec’s profile had made them feel more satisfied about their relationship. Eventual access to her grandmother’s fund was a side benefit. It was probably the only reason she’d considered settling down with him.
“And let’s face it, Zee,” Alec continued with a soft, almost placating smile that would’ve looked good had she not wanted to punch it off his face. “You won’t get a better offer. You’re not a beauty like your sister. Finding a rich, powerful husband like me is a rare opportunity for you.”
The audacity of this man truly galled her. Forget asking for forgiveness, there wasn’t an ounce of remorse or shame on his face. And like a true narcissist, he’d turned it around on her and her so-called inadequacy, and tried to make her feel insecure using her own sister. That was possibly the stupidest thing he’d tried to do. Her sister was her best friend, her outside beauty not even half of her inside. She loved Zen and was proud of her every damn day. Trying to drive a wedge between them was idiotic.
A loud bell rang from the back and she turned to see the fight
end, the beast clearly the winner as he walked to a corner of the room to talk to some bald guy. She looked at his back, marred and tangled with scars, and wondered what had happened to him.
Turning to face her ex for one last time, she stepped closer and patted his chest.
“We’re done, Alec,” she declared as the crowd slowly headed to the opposite side of the room. “I’d marry anyone but you.”
He chuckled. “You’re crazy.”
Zephyr smiled. Finally, something he’d said right. “I am. I was also the best you had. Now go and fuck everyone you want. I know I will.”
Before he could say another word, she turned on her heel, her target locked on a massive back now covered in a black t-shirt, the fabric stretched tautly across it. As she cut through the crowd, she knew Alec was watching her, and as she headed in the direction she was heading in, she could feel the eyes of the others fall upon her.
And none of it mattered, because if this was him, if she’d found him after ten years . . .
She had to know. She needed to know. Fuck everyone else.
She was almost three feet from the beast and the guy he was speaking with when she saw the muscles in his back stiffen, his neck turning to sear her with one golden eye.
Liquid, molten gold.
Gold that had once seared her veins.
Him.
Her step faltered for a split second.
He was larger now, more intimidating, and not just because of his massive size. It was the way the ugly scar slashed from his hairline, over his missing eye, across his cheek, and down to the corner of his lips, disappearing under his short beard. It was the way he was wearing a leather patch over his eye and still sensed someone in his personal space before they announced themselves. It was the way he
held more power in that singular gaze than most people did in their entire bodies. He hadn’t lost that with his right eye.
His face showed nothing, no recognition. Was it because of the hair? She’d kept it blonde back then, and she’d definitely gained some curves in the time in between. But had she really become that unrecognizable? She was completely out of her depth, but she’d already jumped off-board, and hell if she wasn’t going to swim.
Inhaling with purpose, she closed the distance between them even as he watched her like a hawk, and jumped.
His hands instinctively caught her as she wrapped her legs around his waist, her hands gripping his shoulders. He was solid, immovable, and holding her up with an ease she’d never, ever experienced again in the last decade.
Without giving him a moment to ask anything, she slanted her face and kissed him, her lips trembling with emotion.
He stiffened, his grip on her waist tightening slightly as he pulled back a bit, something akin to curiosity emanating from him. She didn’t know what his sex life was like, but she doubted he had random girls climbing his frame and planting one on him. Or maybe he did.
“Please,” she whispered in the space between their mouths, knowing it was that girl inside her who had kissed a wild boy speaking. She needed to believe for herself that this was him, feel it in her bones, feel it in their kiss.
His golden gaze considered her for a small second before suddenly he shifted her, holding her up with only one arm under her ass, the other hand still wrapped in tape, fisting her hair and pulling her neck back in a move that was sheer power.
Raw, unadulterated power.
Zephyr didn’t know what she’d expected, but this hadn’t been it. Not the way he’d taken control, not the way her heart began to pound a frantic beat in a response to it, not the way her core clenched. It was
as though the tug on her scalp and his taped hand around her hair had found something primitive deep inside her and poked it into a strange awareness.
He’d not done that before.
His mouth came closer to hers, and she waited, unable to move her neck and close the distance. In essence, she was immobilized and it did something to her. Up close, she could make out the slight sheen of sweat over his bronzed skin, the depth of his scar tissue, the intricate detailing on his eye patch. It was fancier than she’d expected, some kind of leather. She wondered what it felt like to touch. Lord, she was crazy. She’d just seen this man pummel another, and there she was on him, like an orangutan with its favorite tree.
“What’s a little rainbow like you doing in a shithole like this?” he murmured as he inhaled the side of her neck, so softly she felt his words more than heard them. She knew she had a colorful personality, but she’d never been called a rainbow before, and the way he said it was nice, really nice.
But it also told her something—he didn’t recognize her.
Nothing.
Something akin to hurt and disappointment crashed over her. What did she expect, though? He had clearly lived through a lot, and it had been ten years.
“It’s a long story,” she told him softly, swallowing the turmoil of emotions inside her.
He didn’t move, just observed her.
Zephyr closed her eyes in mortification. The last hour had been one hit to her heart after another. She should probably just go home and have a good cry.
She began to move her legs, and his grip on her hair tightened, freezing her in place.
She could feel the heat emanating from his body. He smelled like
the wilderness, like what she imagined the dark depths of the wild forest beyond the city smelled like—sweat, wood, musk, and something unknown. With her eyes closed, she could imagine him in another time, another place, hunting in the wild, coming to his cave and fucking his woman raw. That was the word. Raw. She’d never smelled anyone so raw. Most boys during her teens had drowned themselves in body sprays that advertised women falling on them if they used it, and Alec always put on cologne that probably cost more than what she earned in a month. Alpha had always smelled like he looked. Raw.
Before she could think another thought, he angled her head with his grip and slashed his mouth upon hers.
Her heartbeat fractured.
Coffee. Mint. Him.
His taste exploded on her tongue, his mouth moving over hers expertly, tongue gliding along with hers in a way that made her thighs tighten around his torso in memory.
He could kiss. Like really, really kiss. He always could.
She felt the scar tissue on the side of his mouth press into hers, the sensation not unpleasant but one she was unfamiliar with, his short beard creating subtle friction that really did something for her. She’d never have thought she’d be into facial hair, but damn . . .
She wrapped her arms around his neck, unconsciously pressing her body as close as she could to his, her hips grinding over his solid muscles without thought, rubbing her in a way that was decadent.
It wasn’t a kiss; it was an experience, and she felt like a virgin having her first with him again. New sensations coursed through her body, the promise of something dark and delicious and depraved on the horizon that had everything feminine in her unfurl and open and accept his pillaging of her being. It was a kiss, both new and familiar,
like a melody she’d heard long ago and never forgot. And her core knew; he would fuck now like he kissed, and god she wanted to know what that would be like. Would he hold her down and slam her into the bed? Would he pull her hair back and devour her mouth as he plunged inside her? Would he mark her skin with his teeth?
A shiver coursed down her body, her nipples tightening to hard points against his chest.
A romantic at heart, she’d always believed in love at the first meeting. Her parents had been a love-at-first-meeting couple. One of her colleagues was a love-at-first-meeting couple. Even her grandparents on her dad’s side had been a couple like that. And she’d found that with him a long time ago, and kissing him kindled it back to life— the emotions, the attraction, the longing, and the pain. Oh, the sweet, bitter pain.
He was her love at first meeting. And she didn’t know who he was now, but he was hers. He’d always been hers.
A few whistles rent the air, someone catcalled, and she blinked her eyes open, looking at the man who had tilted her world on its axis again. Suddenly remembering they weren’t alone, Zephyr pulled back and looked at him, her breasts heaving, flushed against his chest.
His mouth was wet and slightly pink from her gloss, and he seemed unbothered as he watched her.
She wiggled down back to her own feet, tilting her neck back, because lord, the man was blessed by the vertical gods and she was not. His height seemed to be the only recognizable trait from the old him—the bulk, the scars, the injuries, and the danger were all new.
He didn’t recognize her, so she needed to begin again. “Thanks.”
The unscarred side of his lip twitched a bit, his golden eye going behind her. “You with him?” he asked. His voice was . . . more masculine than she remembered. She really didn’t know how else to put it. The baritone was deeper, the tenor was graver, the sound a little
